Sunday, March 11, 2018

"We will not be removing our recent patch in order to keep blocking cheats effectively."

It's been a good few days for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, all told. It showed off its next map alongside development plans for 2018, while Gabe Newell revealed that it was the third highest earning game ever on Steam. But it's been by far a perfect week. An anti-cheat update on Thursday began randomly banning innocent players, while the latest patch is creating an equal amount of chaos, causing random crashes and wild framerate fluctuations for some players.
Most of the issues appear to be caused by a conflict between new anti-cheat measures and other programmes running on a player's PC, but there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to fix it. "We released a patch yesterday without going through any maintenance to add some new anti-cheat features. However, we know that some players are having compatibility issues, causing the game to crash or are unable to launch the game," developer Bluehole said on the game's forums.
"We are doing our best to resolve this issue. With the issue that is related to the game not launching, we are checking for any conflict between anti-cheat solutions and other programs." If you're not able to launch the game, follow the instructions here. Bluehole also recommended that you add tslgame and tslgame_BE to your anti-virus software's exception list.
It apologised for the problems, but said it wouldn't be rolling back the change "in order to keep blocking cheats effectively".
The framerate stuttering appears to be a more widespread issue, and this Reddit thread is full of players reporting that the game is virtually unplayable. A Bluehole community manager has responded in that thread to say that individual developers were experiencing similar issues, and that systematically closing down background applications one-by-one and then relaunching the game had fixed it.
"Some of us in the office have experienced the same problems ourselves, and after some troubleshooting we’ve determined that various programs are interfering with our anti-cheat solution, and that there’s a lot of tweaking we need to do on our end to fix that."
To keep up to date with the progress of a fix, I'd keep an eye on the game's support Twitter account, which usually posts fairly promptly when anything changes.
Thanks, Kotaku.